Authors: Wilbur Smith
Endlessly she had written to the newspapers, at home and in
the Cape, denouncing almost every proclamation he made as Chief
Native Commissioner of Matabeleland. She had attacked his
conscripted labour policy which provided the ranchers and the
miners with the black men they desperately needed to ensure the
continuance and the prosperity of this new land. She had
condemned the levy of his native police force he used to keep
order over the tribe. Once she had even stormed into an
indaba
he was holding with the tribal indunas and
harangued them in fluent Sindebele in his presence, calling the
indunas ‘old women’ and ‘cowards’ for
submitting to the authority of Mungo and the British South Africa
Company. Then not an hour later, she had waited beside the path,
in thick bush near the ford of the river, and had waylaid him as
he rode back from the
indaba
. Naked as wild animals, they
had made love upon her saddle blanket in the veld, and the fury
of it came so close to mutual destruction that it left him shaken
and appalled.
‘I hate you, oh God, how I hate you,’ she had
whispered, her eyes full of tears, as she mounted her horse again
and galloped away, heedless of the thorns that ripped at her
skirts.
Her exhortations to the indunas were blatant incitement to
rebellion and bloody revolution, while in her book
Trooper
Hackett of Matabeleland
, in which she mentioned Mungo by
name, the words she put into his mouth and the actions she
ascribed to him were a most virulent slander. Mr Rhodes and other
directors of the BSA Company had urged Mungo to take legal action
against her.
‘Against my own wife, sir?’ He had slanted his
single eye and smiled ruefully. ‘What a fool I would
appear.’
She was the most implacable and remorseless adversary he had
ever known, and yet the thought of her dead desolated him, so
that each time she sank back towards the abyss, so he sank with
her, and when she rallied, so his spirits soared to match
her.
Yet the play of emotion and the way in which he drained his
own reserves to sustain her wearied him to the very core of his
soul, and it went on and on, without respite, day after day
– until finally Elizabeth broke in on the few hours of
deathlike sleep which he allowed himself. He heard the emotion
that shook her voice and saw the tears in her eyes.
‘It’s over, General St John,’ she said, and
he flinched as though she had struck him across the face, and
staggered groggily to his feet. He felt his own tears sting the
rims of his eyes.
‘I cannot believe it.’ Then he realized that
Elizabeth was smiling through her tears, and she was proffering
the enamelled pot she held in both hands.
It stank of ammonia and the peculiar rotting odour of the
disease, but the colour of the fluid had changed, from the deadly
black of Guinness stout to the light golden of Pilsner beer.
‘It’s over,’ Elizabeth repeated. ‘Her
water has cleared. She’s safe. Thank God, she’s
safe.’
By that afternoon Robyn was well enough once more to order
Mungo St John to leave Khami Mission, and the following morning
she tried to rise from the cot to enforce that order.
‘I cannot allow my son to come under your evil
influences for another day.’
‘Madam—’ he started, but she swept his
protest aside.
‘So far I have resolved not to tell the child about you.
He does not know that his father once commanded the most
notorious slaving fleet that ever made the middle passage. He
does not know of the thousands of damned souls, innocent children
of Africa, whom you carried away to a far continent. He does not
yet understand that it was you, and your ilk, that waged bloody
and unprovoked war upon Lobengula and the Matabele nation, nor
that you are the instrument of cruel oppression over them –
but unless you leave, I shall change that resolve.’ Her
voice crackled with some of its old force, and Juba had to hold
her by the shoulders. ‘I order you to leave Khami
immediately.’
The effort left Robyn white and panting, and under
Juba’s gentle chubby hands she sank back against the
bolster, and Elizabeth whispered to Mungo:
‘She might have a relapse. Perhaps it would be
best.’
The corner of Mungo’s mouth twisted up in that mocking
grin that Robyn remembered so well, but in the golden depths of
his single eye there was a shadow, a regret or a terrible
loneliness, Robyn could not be sure.
‘Your servant, ma’am.’ He gave her an
exaggerated bow, and strode from the sick room. Robyn listened to
his footsteps crossing the veranda and going down the steps. Only
then did she push Juba’s hands away and roll on her side to
face the blank whitewashed wall.
At the crest, where the path ran through a saddle between the
thickly forested hills, Mungo St John reined in his mare, and
looked back. The veranda of the homestead was deserted and he
sighed and picked up the reins again and faced ahead down the
road into the north, but he did not shake up the mare. Instead he
frowned, and lifted his chin to look into the heavens.
The northern sky was dark. It was as though a heavy curtain
fell from the high heaven to the earth. It was not a cloud, for
it had a peculiar density and body to it, like the poisonous
plankton of the mysterious red tide which he had seen sweeping
across the surface of the southern Atlantic, spreading death and
desolation wherever it touched.
Yet Mungo had never seen anything like this. The magnitude of
it challenged the imagination. It reached in a great arc around
half the horizon, and even as he watched, it swept towards the
sun which stood near its noon zenith.
Far north Mungo had seen the khamsin winds raise the mighty
sandstorms over the Sahara, yet he realized there was not a sand
desert within a thousand miles which could generate such a
phenomenon. This was beyond his experience, and his puzzlement
turned to alarm as he realized the speed at which this thing was
bearing down upon him.
The fringes of the dark veil touched the rim of the sun and
the white noon light altered. The mare fidgeted uncomfortably
under Mungo, and a troop of guinea fowl, that had been chittering
in the grass beside the track, fell silent. Swiftly the murky
tide flooded the heavens, and the sun turned a sullen orange,
like a disc of heated metal from the smithy’s forge, and a
vast shadow fell upon the land.
A silence had fallen upon the world. The murmurous insect
chorus from the forest was stilled, the tinking and cheeping of
small birds in the scrub had died away, sounds that were the
background song of Africa, unnoticed until they were gone.
Now the stillness was oppressive. The mare nodded her head and
the tinkle of her curb chain sounded jarringly loud. The
spreading curtain thickened and smothered the sky, the shadow
deepened.
Now there was a sound. A faint and distant sibilance like the
wind shifting the sugary white sands of the desert dunes. The sun
glowed dully as the ashes of a dying camp-fire.
The faint hissing sound gathered strength, like the hollow
echo in a seashell held to the ear, and the filtered sunlight was
a weird purplish glow. Mungo shivered with a kind of religious
awe, though the heat of noon seemed even more oppressive in the
gloom.
The strange rustling sound mounted swiftly, became a deep
humming flutter, and then the rush of high winds; and the sun was
gone, blotted out completely. Out of the half-light he saw it
coming low across the forest, sweeping towards him in twisting
columns like some monstrous fog-bank.
With a low roar of millions upon millions of wings, it was
upon him. It struck like a volley of grapeshot from a cannon,
driving into his face, the impact of each horny-winged body
striking with a numbing shock that broke his skin and drew
blood.
He flung up his hands to protect his face, and the startled
mare reared, and it was a miracle of horsemanship that he kept
his seat. He was half-blinded and dazed by the rushing torrent of
wings about his head, and he snatched at the air, and they were
so thick that he caught one of the flying insects.
It was almost twice as long as his forefinger, wings a glaring
orange slashed with intricate designs of black. The thorax was
covered in horny armour, and from the helmeted head stared the
bulging multiple eyes, yellow as polished topaz, and the long
back legs were fanged with red-tipped thorns. It kicked
convulsively in his hand, piercing the skin and leaving a fine
line of blood droplets upon it.
He crushed it and it crackled and exploded in a burst of
yellow juice. ‘Locusts!’ He looked up again,
marvelling at their multitudes. ‘The third plague of
Egypt,’ he spoke aloud, then swung the mare away from the
onrushing wall of flying bodies, and put his heels into her,
driving her at a gallop back down the hill towards the Mission.
The locust cloud flew faster than the mare could go at a full
gallop, so he rode in semi-darkness, surrounded by the great
drumming roar of wings.
A dozen times he almost lost the track, so dense was the swarm
in the air around him. They settled on his back and crawled over
him, the sharp feet needling his exposed skin. As soon as he
struck them away, others took their place, and he had a sense of
horror, of being overwhelmed and drowned in a seething cauldron
of living organisms.
Ahead of him the buildings of Khami Mission loomed out of the
darkened noon day. The twins and servants were gathered on the
veranda, paralysed with astonishment, and he flung himself off
the mare and ran towards them.
‘Get every person who can walk down into the fields.
Take pots, drums – anything they can bang to make a noise,
blankets to wave—’
The twins recovered swiftly. Elizabeth pulled a shawl over her
head to protect it and ran out into the swirling storm of locusts
towards the church and the wards, while Vicky disappeared into
the kitchen and came out carrying a nest of iron pots.
‘Good girl,’ Mungo gave her a quick hug.
‘When this is over I want a word about you and
Harry.’ He snatched the largest pot from her. ‘Come
on.’
With a suddenness that brought them up short from a dead run,
the air cleared and the sunlight was so white and blinding that
they had to shield their eyes against it.
It was no release, for the entire heaven-high cloud of locusts
had sunk to the earth, and though the sky was blue and high, the
fields and the forest were transformed. The tallest trees looked
like grotesquely coloured haystacks, seething heaps of orange and
black. The branches swayed and sagged to the unbearable weight of
tiny bodies, and every few seconds there was a sharp crack as a
branch snapped and came crashing down. Before their eyes the
standing corn flattened under the onslaught, and the very earth
crawled with the myriad clicking, rustling bodies.
They ran into the fields, a hundred frantic human figures,
banging the metal pots and flapping the coarse grey hospital
blankets, and in front of each of them the insects rose in a
brief puff of wings and resettled as they passed.
Now the air was raucous with a new sound. The excited shrieks
of thousands of birds gorging upon the swarm. There were
squadrons of jet-black drongos with long forked tails, starlings
of iridescent malachite green, rollers and bee-eaters in jewelled
colours of turquoise and sunlight yellow, carmine and purple,
jinking and whirling in full flight, ecstatic with greed. The
storks strode knee-deep through the living carpet, marabous with
horrific scaly heads, woolly-necked storks with scarves of fluffy
white, saddle-bills with yellow medallions decorating their long
red and black beaks, all of them pecking hungrily at the living
banquet.
It did not last long, less than an hour. Then, as abruptly as
it had settled, the great swarm roared spontaneously into the air
as though it were a single creature. Once again an unnatural dusk
fell across the earth as the sun was obliterated, and a false
dawn followed as the clouds thinned and winged away southwards.
In the empty fields, the human figures seemed tiny and
insignificant as they stared about them in horror. They did not
recognize their home.
The maize fields were reduced to bare brown earth, even the
coarse pithy stalks of the corn had been devoured. The rose
bushes around the homestead were merely brown sticks. The peach
and apple blossom in the orchards was gone and bare twisted
branches seemed to be an echo of winter, even the indigenous
forests on the hills and the thick riverine bush along the banks
of the Khami river had been devastated.
There was no trace of green, no leaf nor blade of grass
untouched in the wide brown swathe of destruction that the swarm
had blazed through the heart of Matabeleland.
J
uba travelled
with two female attendants. It was a symptom of the decline that
had come upon the Matabele nation. There was a time, before the
occupation of the Company, when a senior wife of one of the great
indunas of the House of Kumalo would have had an entourage of
forty women in waiting, and fifty plumed and armed
amadoda
to see her safely to her husband’s kraal. Now Juba carried
her own sleeping-mat balanced upon her head, and despite her
great and abundant flesh, she moved with an extraordinary
lightness and grace, her back straight and her head on high.
She had shed the woollen vest, now that she was away from the
Mission, although she still wore the crucifix around her neck.
Her huge naked breasts swung and bounced with youthful
elasticity. They had been anointed with fat and shone in the
sunlight, and her legs flashed under the short cowhide apron as
she moved at a gait between a trot and a glide, that covered the
dusty track at surprising speed.
The two attendants, both young newly married women from
Juba’s kraal, followed her closely, but they were silent,
not singing nor laughing. Instead they turned their heads from
side to side under their burdens to stare in awe at the bleak and
denuded land around them. The locust swarms had passed this way
also. The bare crippled trees were devoid of insect or bird life.
The sun had already scorched the exposed earth and it was
crumbling into dust and blowing away on the little eddies of
wind.